#one of my favorite scenes from first class is when bobby is teaching hank to drive

[wellnoe]

the scottjeanwarren love triangle + bobby drake looking at it is so important to me

[chavighurst]

Americana Lifetime Achievement Awards 2017

I was once again pleased to contribute program notes for the Americana Honors & Awards Lifetime Achievement winners for 2017. I wanted to give these a permanent home on the web, so to read my short essays on Robert Cray, HighTone Records founders Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg, Iris DeMent, Graham Nash, Van Morrison and the Hi Rhythm Section, click through to the jump and scroll. They’re all on one post. 

Robert Cray - Performer

On the jacket of the 1983 Alligator Records ensemble album Showdown! a young Robert Cray mimes a guitar jam, standing between blues legends Johnny “Clyde” Copeland and Albert Collins. Cray’s smiling gaze is transfixed by the left hand of his hero Collins on the fretboard. The image symbolizes the hours Cray spent as an aspiring guitarist, studying the Ice Man’s phrases and passionate vibrato.

By that year, Cray had emerged as a favorite in the clubs and theaters of the Pacific Northwest. He’d released two albums on HighTone Records and was being hailed as “a one man Wave of The Blues Future,” as expressed by album producers Bruce Iglauer and Dick Sherman. But even their expectations were exceeded over the next few years as Robert Cray became the only African American blues and traditional R&B artist/songwriter to enjoy massive radio airplay and platinum record sales in his era. His vehicle was the album Strong Persuader and the hit single “Smoking Gun.” His tools were a silky vocal style reminiscent of Sam Cooke, a piquant electric guitar that moved the music in both lead and rhythm mode, and original songs that told relatable stories in fresh, carefully crafted forms.

High profile collaborations further fueled Cray’s prominence, including recordings with Eric Clapton and John Lee Hooker, a slot on the feature documentary Chuck Berry tribute concert Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll and tours with the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt. Steadily and without mis-steps he amassed a deep catalog and nailed down five Grammy Awards.

Cray’s most recent project saw him return to Memphis where sessions with the veteran studio cats of Royal Studios produced Robert Cray and Hi Rhythm, an 11-song set that underlines Cray’s statesman stature in American music and his enduring fascination with traditional R&B. His success, even in the infertile soil of 1980s pop/rock radio, wasn’t a matter of fortuitous timing but of soul and skill. He’d have been a hitmaker in the 60s, 70s, or 2010s had it worked out that way. He’s that tapped into a timeless firmament.

Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg / HighTone Records - Jack Emerson Lifetime Achievement Award for Executive

Several of this year’s lifetime achievement awards are connected by history. Robert Cray was introduced to the public thanks to the vision and risk-taking of Larry Sloven and Bruce Bromberg who made 1983’s Bad Influence the inaugural release of their new HighTone Records. It proved an auspicious start for a company that would enrich and enlarge the very idea of American roots music, with important releases in blues, country, folk and rock and roll. The label produced more than 300 albums over 25 years, including essential discography titles by Bill Kirchen, Dave Alvin, Rosie Flores, Chris Gaffney, Dick Dale, Chris Smither, Tom Russell, Geoff Muldaur, Dale Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and 13-time Americana Award winner Buddy Miller.

“Larry and Bruce cared about signing music that was real. They didn’t care if something was making a splash,” Miller says. And across his four solo albums, plus two more by Julie Miller and a duo album, “they gave us complete creative freedom. I’m so glad this award is happening.”

Sloven and Bromberg had jobs in record sales and distribution when they met in the late 1970s, bonding musically over a shared love of Merle Haggard. When they took on the Robert Cray release six years later, it was a side project with little hope of being anything else. But two years in, HighTone Records was a self-sufficient, full time pursuit, based out of Oakland, CA.

Bromberg, a blues maven with a history of producing important artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Johnny Shines, was the chief talent scout; he contributed as a songwriter as well. Sloven tended more to the business side of the label with an art-before-commerce philosophy. With the multi-platinum status of Cray’s 1986’s Strong Persuader album, the partners were able to put a firm foundation under the venture and release what moved them. That included a distinguished blues reissue series, spotlights on underappreciated veterans like Hank Thompson and ventures into Latin roots music.

The founders never achieved their dream of bringing Merle Haggard into the label’s fold, but they did oversee a tribute concert and album with Marshall Crenshaw, Joe Ely, Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent and others performing Haggard songs. The resulting Tulare Dust project became the first No. 1 album on the very first Gavin Report Americana chart, making it a signifier and landmark for the new format. Today, any respectable Americana/roots CD collection will have scores of HighTone logos on the shelves.

Iris DeMent - Trailblazer

Few artists have told their roots music origin story in song as clearly and memorably as Iris DeMent did on her 1992 debut album Infamous Angel with the song “Moma’s Opry.” In a proud, plaintive voice, DeMent relates: “I'll never forget her face when she revealed to me, That she'd dreamed about singing at The Grand Ole Opry.”

With a few strokes, the artist conveys how deeply music ran in her heritage, as well as music’s power to widen horizons and inspire hope. Music, she told an interviewer once, “wasn’t a plaything” in her family. “It was something you had to have to live.”

DeMent’s own aspirations were quieter and more personal than being a country star, but she gradually developed a yearning to write and perform. She joined a widening American folk music scene in the 1980s, where her tart, rural diction became a country counterpart to the more urbane sounds of the Lilith Fair era. Fellow Americana Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Jim Rooney championed her music and helped her land on Rounder/Philo Records, where her first album earned such acclaim and success it was picked up by Warner Bros.

DeMent has been more selective and patient than prolific in her creative career, but her work is unfailingly observant, compassionate and relevant. In “Our Town,” one of her earliest songs, she documented rural America’s economic decline before it was a hot national topic. She offered a sort of hillbilly Taoism with “Let The Mystery Be.” And her 1996 anthem “Wasteland of the Free” was a searing and comprehensive indictment of America’s shortcomings that presaged the politics of today.

Iris DeMent has earned the Trailblazer Award for her commitment to making classic folk and country forms relevant in her time.

Graham Nash - Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award

When Graham Nash emigrated to the United States in the late 60s to join Crosby, Stills & Nash, the songwriter wasted no time and minced no words engaging in America’s vital, cacophonous democracy. He wrote “Chicago” about the fraught Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the trial of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and the Chicago Eight. Angry but idealistic, it included the line “We can change the world / rearrange the world.” About the same time, his acerbic “Military Madness” confronted his adopted home country with its violence in Vietnam. That song became the opening track on his debut solo album in 1971. These and other compositions marked the opening salvos in a life devoted to music and change-making, from Woodstock to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

Nash says he developed his sense of social justice as a boy, seeing how the judicial system in England treated his hard-up father versus its genteel lenience with the upper classes. His music took flight in England as a singer and songwriter with The Hollies. Success with that pop group led him to the US on tour, where he met David Crosby and Stephen Stills. His decision to move – musically and geographically – was inspired by a chance to make music that said something topical and vital at a time of great tumult.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, with and without Neil Young, became one of the iconic folk/rock groups, whose success was fueled as much by its message as by its floating, inspiring harmonies. They helped make Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” a national anthem of the counterculture. They made a hit of Nash’s starry eyed and hopeful “Teach Your Children” only to purposefully bump it off the radio when Neil Young’s hot take on Kent State, “Ohio,” needed to vent anger at the establishment.

Nash’s music-fueled activism extended beyond the quartet and his own musical pursuits. In 1979, he partnered with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt to create Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) and to produce No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future. In the summer of 2006, Nash and his old quartet toured behind Neil Young’s angry Living With War album. It was the first time Nash experienced death threats. Nevertheless, he told Jambase: “I was out there doing what I am supposed to do, which is to make music and to a certain degree entertain people, but to a large degree make them think.”

With Graham Nash it was ever thus.

Van Morrison - Songwriter

Where The Rolling Stones helped boomerang the blues of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters back to American audiences during the British Invasion phase of rock and roll, Van Morrison accomplished something similar on behalf of Ray Charles and Solomon Burke. R&B pioneers were linchpins of Morrison’s father’s record collection in Belfast, Northern Ireland. And American roots music informed Van’s development at every level. His first guitar lessons came from a Carter Family folio compiled by Alan Lomax. He formed a skiffle group and then a proto-rock and roll band named after Leadbelly’s Midnight Special. Gradually, improbably, the secondary school dropout built a life in music that took its first public step with Them, a rock and roll band that toured the US in 1966 and left behind Morrison’s widely covered “Gloria.”

Morrison’s solo career began with the R&B flavored “Brown Eyed Girl,” which was part of a small and frustrating record deal in 1967. In near poverty conditions, in the Fall of 1968 in New York, Morrison composed and recorded his masterwork Astral Weeks. While its initial reception was mixed commercially and critically, the album was rather quickly recognized as a profound and iconoclastic statement. When Moondance, the album and single, followed in early 1970, Morrison’s career exploded.

He’s a supple, emotive and attention grabbing vocalist, but his epic output of songs gave that voice wings over a 50-year, 35-album career. He wrote about love, freedom and beauty in “Tupelo Honey.” He wrote unsentimentally but nostalgically about his youth in “Take Me Back” and “Redwood Tree.” He employed dense and cryptic language when it suited him, as in “St Dominic’s Preview,” and yet he could write the breezy and romantic “Moondance” as well. He was ever spiritual and sometimes overtly prayerful, as with “In The Garden.”

With access to a vast range of human emotion, an eye for provocative subject matter and an ear for soaring melodies, Van Morrison would have been a major influence even if he’d only written for other singers. Happily and majestically, this highly controlled and creatively demanding artist has been his own best muse.

Hi Rhythm Section - Instrumentalists

As the mighty Stax Records empire began to unwind around 1972, Hi Records found its footing and became home for a new wave of soul, steered by Memphis lifer Willie Mitchell out of Royal Studios at 1320 South Lauderdale Street. As with Stax and FAME Studio down the road in Muscle Shoals, AL, Hi/Royal developed a sound defined by a cadre of studio musicians. They became known as Hi Rhythm.

Three brothers were at the core of it - Mabon “Teenie” Hodges on guitar plus Charles on organ and Leroy on bass. Drummer Howard Grimes was an alum of Satellite and Stax Records. And keyboardist Archie “Hubbie” Turner was also in the circle. They are the silk purse making the pocket on Al Green's "Love and Happiness," Otis Clay's "Tryin' To Live my Life Without You," Ann Peebles' "I Can't Stand The Rain," Syl Johnson's "Dresses Too Short," O.V. Wright's "Eight Men, Four Women" and many more.

Scott Bomar, founder of the Bo-Keys, in which Grimes and Turner play today, says the Hi Rhythm section followed in the footsteps of the Memphis Boys, Mitchell’s first house band, when they went on to work for Chips Moman at American Sound Studio. Being slightly younger than the Stax team they similarly admired, the Hodges were attuned to the raw energy of rock and roll. “And having three brothers who’d grown up playing music with their father gave them a special feel and bond and chemistry, kind of a telepathy that no other studio group really had,” Bomar says.

The brothers recorded their own work as Hi Rhythm in the mid 70s and regrouped to tour with Albert Collins and Otis Clay. In more recent years, members of Hi Rhythm have played on projects by Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper, Cat Power and Robert Cray. They’re also prominent in the 2014 documentary Take Me To The River featuring meetings between old and young Memphis talent. Teenie Hodges died in 2014. The rest remain part of the heartbeat of Memphis.